I Am a Small Business. Why Should I Blog

The purpose of your marketing efforts is to answer your customers’ and prospects’ questions – to help solve problems and pain points for them, and to educate them. Blogging is one of the best ways to engage with people who are looking to purchase your product or services. It also helps you establish your company’s knowledge and thought leadership in your area of expertise. Your blog is a digital “what can you do for me” statement, although it is 100% informational and 0% sales pitch.

So, what is a blog and why does my company need to be doing it?

As defined by HubSpot, business blogging is:

A marketing tactic that uses blogging to get your business more online visibility. A business blog is a marketing channel – like social media, direct mail, email marketing, and other channels – that helps support business growth.

Now let’s answer the question – why my company blog should:

Drives traffic to your website – it doesn’t matter how customers and prospects find you (especially prospects). It may be a blog post that brings them to your website.

Answers questions – people have problems to solve and they may be looking at your product or service. Be the company who answers their questions and solves their problems and you have a great chance of winning their business.

Humanize your company – in this digital world we live in, it’s nice to hear from an actual human who understands your pain points. It could be the differentiator that makes your company stand out from the field.

Be found – SEO (search engine optimization) benefits from your consistent blogging. New content to your website – that’s good for SEO. People search for subjects with long-tail keywords or phrases – the subject of your blog can be what they are search for and that’s good for SEO.

Engagement – your audience can engage with someone from your company, a human being, by asking questions or posting a comment. In the “old days”, reaching out and getting a response from the marketing department (or anyone else, for that matter) was not always easy or with quick response.

Establish expertise and thought leadership – this is your chance to show your company’s knowledge and strengths in an area. You can show expertise that may be the difference in a prospect engaging your company or not engaging your company.

Blogs are cost-effective – this is one of many marketing efforts that can work to complement each other. You will not need to recreate content for each effort you put forth – blog, social media, brochure, case study, infographic and website content. You can create content once and use that content for all these initiatives and more.

This isn’t even a complete list. It’s merely a list of some of the most important reasons why your company should blog.

Here are some great stats that should convince you about the value of blogging as an important part of your marketing efforts:

67% – Marketers that use blogs and get more leads than those who do not.

81% – of U.S. online consumers that trust information and advice from blogs.

97% – Companies that blog who have more inbound links.

61% – of U.S. online consumers who have made a purchase based on recommendations from a blog.

60% – of consumers who feel more positive about a company after reading custom content on its site.

70-80% – of users who ignore paid ads and only focus on organic results. (source)

10% – on average, compounding blog posts that make up all blog posts and generate 38% of overall traffic. (Source)

Stats compiled by Impact.

Blogging is something every business should be doing. It is a relatively low-cost marketing activity that can level the playing field a bit with companies who have big budgets. With technology that gives you this opportunity, why not take it?